University of Hawaii researchers tracked dozens of hungry tiger
sharks to a remote atoll in the Papahanaumokuakea Marine
National Monument this summer. Civil Beat photojournalist Alana
Eagle documents the expedition in this multimedia special report.

Facebook Just Unfriended Us

Facebook announced Thursday that it’s changing the formula for what users see on their News Feeds because the social media giant wants people to come away with “… more meaningful interactions,” according to a post by CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg has stated that the world feels “anxious and divided” and that Facebook is partly to blame.

What that means in practical terms is that Facebook’s News Feed will surface more posts from your friends and family.

And as you scroll through your feeds, you will begin to see less of Civil Beat’s content as well as other pages from media, nonprofits and small businesses.

Facebook explains that once these changes take effect, these type of pages will see their reach, video watch time and referral traffic decrease.

The types of posts that will surface higher in the feed will be posts that generate conversation between people. Facebook’s Director of Product Mark Hull explains how the feed will work in the video below:

To make sure you continue seeing content from pages that you like or follow, there are a few steps you can take.

For example, Civil Beat has created Facebook Groups around certain topics. We created the Hawaii News group to discuss news stories, posts from readers sharing updates from their community.

The other way to make sure you see posts from a page is to engage in the comments below, ideally in a civil manner. Likes and shares also help. Another option is to click the follow button on the page and select “see first” to keep that page’s posts in your News Feed.

The changes are set to take place sometime next week but many news organizations have already seen some of the effects. Facebook says that this is not a complete cutoff for some news pages, which has been tested in other countries.

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